Preventing The Inevitable

Chapter 20

Sakura flipped open the deceiving cover of the seemingly inconspicuous book. And once again she read the first words—the most provocative title to a book she'd ever come across.

She hadn't imagined it after all.
Of course, that would've made things far too easy for her.

Sakura was almost disappointed to find all of this hadn't simply been an intricate prank when she turned the page and read the headline at the top of a long text.

'1: The Uchiha—The Most Savage and Depraved Clan of the Elemental Nations'

The first thing she noticed were several underlined passages of the text scattered across the page. Taking a quick look at them, Sakura found the highlighted words to be just that—some reasonably placed highlights. Maybe the author was putting emphasis on the important bits by underlining in dark blue rather than plain black like the text.

Sakura began reading.

The text itself was rather tame compared to the accompanying title. It summarized the history of the Uchiha in a short paragraph, which was quite contradictory to what the headline implied, as Sakura had expected an elaborate introduction, starting from the enigmatic origins of the clan and their ablities, their steady uprising, to the massive territory they eventually ruled under their amassed power.

The first part of the book had none of that. Instead, most of that page and the following ten or so discussed the mystery of their dominant, prevailing powers. The focus lay on the question of how the gods would allow such overpowering and mighty eyes to exist when most hoping to amass the power the Uchiha possessed would have to do so by mastering hard-earned techniques created and passed down by one's ancestors. The Mangekyō, especially, was described as the prime example of said imbalance.

'It endows its wielders with powers far beyond the rightful limits of mortal men. Such abilities, bordering upon the divine, create a grievous imbalance. To allow these forces to contend among the common man is a profound disruption of the natural order.'

In other words, the author thought it was unfair.

The whole text was written in a degrading manner, dehumanizing the Uchiha by making them out to be vicious beasts that only cared about spilling the blood of their victims. At the same time, righteous people with 'fairly-gained abilities' were held in high regard, praised even.

On page 15, Sakura saw the first annotation.

Messy, scratchy handwriting next to neat, cursive letters. The words held the same hue of dark blue that the underlines were in.

Right. This book had been commented by someone. The same person who'd marked down the approximate publication date.

The annotation—if it could even be called that—was nothing out of the ordinary. The author had gotten a date wrong by a few years, which was corrected. It was about an ambush on another clan, the Senju. The author mentioned it amongst other examples to further undermine the cruelty of the Uchiha. In that particular case, they had attacked a child in a place far away from the main battle, leaving it to bleed out alone in the depths of a forest.

It was cruel, yes, but Sakura couldn't help but think that such actions went both ways. Both Uchiha and Senju had been ambushing each other in dishonorable ways and would use dirty tricks. The author was clearly biased, though she had known that from the moment she read the title.

Sakura skimmed through the rest of the first chapter. It was all repetition of the same few points; the Uchiha were evil like no other; granting them magical eyes for nothing was against the balance of nature; real Shinobi made sacrifices for power, and therefore you should hate them too. She began wondering if the title had been a fluke; maybe the author didn't know anything concrete after all.